An American tries to make sense of Google's new cricket game (GOOG, GOOGL)

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July 17, 2017 5:57 PM

Google's newest Doodle is a playable cricket game, celebrating the ICC Women's Cricket World Cup.

If you go to Google.com front page right now, you can play a fun little cricket game right in your browser — it's a new Google Doodle celebrating the ICC Women's Cricket World Cup, which will wrap up on Sunday.

The game itself is pretty fun. You play as what else but a cricket, and a snail pitches a ball to you. Click your mouse or tap your screen, and your cricket will take a swing. If it connects, it flies off into the field and you get points.

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Okay, so those last two sentences encompass everything about this game that I, an American, seem capable of understanding. Now is the part where I tell you that nothing else about this makes any sense to me. And I have a lot of questions.

I get why you're a cricket. But why are the other team snails? Is this a pun I'm missing?

Why do you turn into a duck if you don't swing at all? Is this whole thing just one big pun?

Why do you and another cricket spend time running back and forth along the beige area when you hit the ball?

Why does missing a ball smash the sticks behind the cricket? Isn't that wasteful?

My only knowledge of cricket comes from Douglas Adams' classic novel "Life, The Universe, and Everything." None of those answers were covered in those pages.

I suppose I could look up the answers to these questions. But as I discovered when I attempted to learn the rules of American football by playing "Madden NFL '16" back in the day, sometimes you're just better off not knowing.

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